Android News
New mobile phone payment system may replace your wallet
August 20, 2010 | by Andrew Kameka
Android News, Carriers
Just yesterday, we highlighted all of the things that your Android phone can replace. Next year, we may be able to add “Wallet” to that list.
Bank of America and Visa are testing contact-less payments delivered through mobile phones. Rather than swipe a debit or credit card, customers could wave their phone above a sensor and the money would be transferred electronically. The technology would be implemented via a small radio chip that sends a signal to the receiver over a very short distance, just in case you were worried about hackers jacking signals.
Our Japanese readers may be a little confused by this “news” because you’ve been doing this for quite some time. We westerners are behind the curve as always. Near-field communications is still developing for Europe and North America but it is starting to attract some major names. Visa is also running a test program with US Bancorp in October and has run pilot programs with other banks. Earlier this month, AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, and Discover Financial were rumored to be collectively working on a mobile payment solution.
Aside from making payments, you can get rid of your loyalty cards and that George Constanza-sized wallet giving you back problems. Verizon has invested $400,000 in CardStar, a cross-platform app that stores customer reward and membership account info that can be scanned from the phone. We covered CardStar a short time ago, and think it would make perfect sense for a mobile phone payment system to have storage for the other cards we use when purchasing.
Now if they can just figure out a way to store my driver’s license information, I’ll have no reason to carry a wallet at all.
The discrepancy between Japan and, well, pretty much everywhere else in m-commerce is interesting – partly stems from success of i-mode and other mobile Internet services (exceeded 80% of mobile phone users there around 2002), allied to high 3G adoption and development of FeliCa services. But contactless payment adoption is certainly taking off elsewhere – my colleague Howard Wilcox wrote an interesting blog on the subject here… Contactless Payments Spreading… My recent post Mobile Banking Services to generate almost 90 billion text messages per year by 2015- up from 30 billion this year- according to Juniper Research
End Times here we come. Mark of the beast is right around the corner. Pretty soon that "chip" will be in you and you wont be able to purchase anything without it.
YES I WAS WAITING FOR THIS. I am always saying to my friends that I wish I could just use my phone to pay for stuff and have the receipt go right to my phone or my email. I'm tired of the huge receipts at Rite Aid/Durane Reade/etc for just a pack of gum… so wasteful
Read in the newspaper there's a small dispute as to who should have control over this business, the networks (At&t, Sprint, Verizon) or the phone manufacturers themselves. Of couse Apple would law claim to their own royalties through iTunes.